With recent spread of the Internet, an advertising technique called “affiliate” has been actively utilized.
The affiliate is a scheme that an administrator of a website provides a link to a website of a predetermined store by, e.g., banner advertisement and the administrator of the website receives a payment from the store when a viewer of the website does his/her shopping at the website of the store through this link.
As a technology concerning the affiliate, there is the following “advertisement distribution system”, for example. Patent Citation 1: Japanese Patent Application Laid-open No. 2003-208538
According to this technology, the cumulative visit number of customers who have accessed a commercial site through an affiliate site is calculated, and a commission is calculated based on a ranking obtained from this calculation.